This is probably the primary reason all the car makers went with EVs over fuel cells. We may not have charging stations on every corner, but by god we do have electricity. Hydrogen, not so much. Like, really not so much.
To some degree, there's the chicken/egg problem.
It's not worth putting in hydrogen fuel stations, unless there are enough customers with hydrogen-fueled cars; and for most people, it's not worth buying a hydrogen-fueled car, if there aren't enough places to fuel it.
There are some other, very serious technical issues with hydrogen. For one thing, it's very difficult, and rather dangerous to store very much of it. I think that the Toyota Mirai's fuel tank is at ten thousand pounds per square inch. That's a damn lot of pressure, a damn lot of force to go very badly wrong.
And because hydrogen molecules are so small, and especially at the extreme pressures under which it is stored in such applications, the molecules tend to squeeze into the spaces between the molecules of whatever other material is in contact with it, eventually damaging that material.
The Saturn V rockets, used to send men to the Moon, used hydrogen as a fuel, but with them, it was pumped in in liquid form, at extremely low temperatures. Surely, you've seen the footage of these rockets taking off, a big plume of fire below, and ice falling off the sides. Once fueled, these rockets had to be launched almost immediately, because the hydrogen could not be kept liquid, could not be kept contained, for very long at all.
Hydrogen has a very high density of energy to mass, which is what made it such a good fuel for the Saturn rockets. But by volume, not so much.. It's very difficult, and dangerous, to try to contain very much hydrogen by mass, in relatively small volumes.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
-
